Experimental Investigation on Transmission Control Protocol Throughput Behavior in Optical Fiber Access Networks

Abstract

This article describes an experimental investigation on the behavior of transmission control protocol in throughput measurements to be used in the verification of the service-level agreement between the Internet service provider and user in terms of line capacity for ultra-broadband access networks typical of fiber-to-the-x architectures. It is experimentally shown different conditions in high bandwidth-delay product links where the estimation of the line capacity based on a single transmission control protocol session results are unreliable. Simple equations reported in this work, and experimentally verified, point out the conditions in terms of packet loss, time delay, and line capacity, that allow consideration of the reliability of the measurement carried out with a single transmission control protocol session test by adopting a suitable measurement time duration. ARTICLE HISTORY

Quality of Service monitoring adopting correlation among active and passive measurements: The experience from the FP7 mPlane project

“…Conversely in recent years the available bandwidth for users has become so great as to call into question the performance of TCP in networks with high bandwidth-delay product. Recently new TCP versions have been introduced, with the aim to better exploit the bandwidth at disposal, however there still exist several situations in which the bandwidth is never exploited up to 100% [10]. The measurement of the line capacity for high bandwidth-delay product links is a debate that has lasted years, but with the growth of the optical fiber penetration such a topic becomes very urgent.…”